Rob Hadick of Dragonfly and David Pakman of CoinFund expressed skepticism about crypto projects competing with major AI players such as OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft. Panelists agreed that decentralized AI systems lack practicality and scalability in the short term, limiting their potential to compete with centralized giants during this market cycle.
Speaking at The Block's Emergence conference in Prague, Rob Haddick, general partner at crypto-focused VC Dragonfly, said he's not confident crypto projects can outperform big AI players like OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft. He said that it is not possible to achieve synergy between the two sectors, much less to achieve synergy between the two sectors. .
Haddick essentially said that what RWA, DePIN, GameFi, AI crypto, and other niche areas are essentially doing is trying to re-invent the wheel that will ultimately only sabotage themselves. He said.
Cryptocurrency has the problem of taking something that actually exists very often off-chain, making it worse, putting it on-chain, and selling it to people who are already on-chain. We see this in every asset class and every story… A lot of what’s happening in this AI and crypto crossover is basically this.
Rob Haddick, general partner at VC Dragonfly, which specializes in cryptocurrencies
Related: US Bitcoin ETF holdings 1.1 million, surpassing Satoshi's Stash to become world's largest
Meanwhile, CoinFund Managing Director David Pacman said that AI's main contribution to cryptocurrencies is improving software development and overall coding efficiency. Pacman explains that AI has huge potential in infrastructure, security, and decentralized applications, calling it “big software.” [and] Technological Revolution”.
Dream on!
An interesting topic that came up during the conference was the rise of AI agents, which are autonomous programs designed to perform complex tasks.
We are talking about a relatively new market with a capitalization of over US$8 billion (AU$12.5 billion). If you look at this category on CoinGecko, you'll find AI projects such as the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, which combines three other AI projects (Ocean Protocol, SingularityNET, and Fetch.ai). Well, let's talk about UX and simplicity.
And what is the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance and other crypto AI projects doing? I don't know. Seriously. But if you dig deeper down the rabbit hole, you'll find a subcategory of AI agents derived from the Truth of Terminals. This market is led by coins such as Fartcoin (FART), Turbo (TURBO), and Goatseus Maximus (GOAT).
Needless to say, review these projects at your own risk.
Regardless, Haddick doubted whether these agent-based, sophisticated, abstract AI crypto projects would have long-term viability, and compared it to the crypto game of 2021 (ouch! ).
I think almost everyone will lose a lot of money.
Rob Haddick, general partner at VC Dragonfly, which specializes in cryptocurrencies
He said AI agents could facilitate payments in cryptocurrency projects.
If there is an agent-based future… then cryptocurrencies are the ideal basis for agent-to-agent and human-to-agent payments.
Rob Haddick, general partner at VC Dragonfly, which specializes in cryptocurrencies
Related: SEC plans to reject Solana ETF in Gensler's final crypto crackdown, Bloomberg analyst says
Ultimately, both panelists agreed that decentralized AI systems are unlikely to challenge dominant centralized players such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta in this market cycle.
Haddick said distributed training and machine learning models are not practical or scalable in the short term.
